FDS Insight Newsletter Oct-Dec 2020

46 cantonal physician, Professor Gonzague Kistler, and controversy blew up. Zürich media was full of the Needle Exchange Conflict. It escalated to such a point that, for a time, my career was at risk. But soon, a lucky coincidence turned the tables. Late one night, long after the city police had cleared the sidewalks, I was summoned, as emergency doctor, to the Hotel Trümpy, where I found a beleaguered Emilie Lieberherr. After I assisted her, the hotel owner and I helped the tall, stately politician to the elevator. She peered down at me and said, ‘Aren’t you that brazen young doctor who is opposing my directives?’ This gave the brazen young doctor the opportunity to have a nice long chat with her. Lieberherr insisted on getting the big picture and allowed me to win her over. She subsequently, and passionately, led the campaign for a mitigating drug policy in Zürich, gaining the city council majority. In the needle exchange conflict, cantonal physician Kistler and health director Peter Wiederkehr threatened to revoke the licenses of recusant practitioners. In an inflammatory letter, Kistler told me it was imperative to protect ‘the upper echelon.’ In response, more than 300 of us licensed practitioners signed a document declaring we would continue to provide people with sterile syringes. We were supported by the cantonal medical association, as prohibiting the action lacked even the ghost of a legal or rational footing. The so-called needle exchange prohibition was the act of an imperious cantonal physician, who had no authority over licensed doctors anyway. For guidance, Kistler looked no further than Professor Ambros Uchtenhagen, a University of Zürich psychiatrist, whose unshakeable opinion was that abstinence was the only treatment for addiction. Life and limb In July 1986, I placed the following announcement in the Zürich Tagblatt: ‘Dear Mr. Policeman, I urgently request you to refrain from collecting fresh syringes from drug users. Taking sterile syringes is against the law and may possibly lead to arrest or fines, as it has been proven that doing this poses a threat not only to the person’s life and limb, but also, by propagating viruses, to public health.’ The police had no right to confiscate injection utensils from drug users. They rescinded their confiscation directive and the so-called needle exchange prohibition faded into obscurity. At Platzspitz, ZAGJP, the Association of Independent Physicians (VUA) and the Red Cross launched a needle and syringe distribution campaign from a bus. The police tolerated the action. Since the onset of the ’80s, immunologist Peter Grob had been inoculating people who used drugs against hepatitis and carrying out blood testing for epidemiological field studies. Supported by the city of Zürich, he could now install a permanent needle exchange, ZIPP- AIDS (Zürich Intervention Pilot Project against AIDS), in the Platzspitz public